My guess is…journalism didn’t deliver what people wanted. Read­ers spoke with their wal­lets and read­er­ship rates. The same happened with U.S. auto­makers, which failed to pro­duce vehicles coveted by the Amer­ican public.

Wrong. And wronger. In case one, the decline of news­pa­pers has almost noth­ing to do with the lengthy moral fail­ures of print journ­al­ism. And in case two, how do you explain grow­ing news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion in coun­tries like India? They must be prac­tising a kind of super-journalism!

I could call it a trib­ute to journalism’s cul­ture of self-flagellation — but it is actu­ally a typ­ical human response: seek­ing to explain events bey­ond our con­trol by ref­er­ence to ourselves.

Con­sider.

The decline of Vaudeville had very little to do with the declin­ing effect­ive­ness of one-liners and the rel­at­ive mer­its of nov­elty acts.

The decline of drive-in movie theatres was not the fault of Hol­ly­wood screenwriters.

And, if you really want to keep going back in time:

The crops did not fail because we offen­ded the gods.

The prob­lems journ­al­ists are con­front­ing are to do with the chan­ging social habits of people who once pur­chased news­pa­pers and were thus appeal­ing to advertisers.

Besides, the very first study of reader pref­er­ences in news­pa­per con­tent (by George Gal­lup at the start of the 1930s) revealed that the things people liked best in them were not the journ­al­ism, but the pic­tures and comic strips.